When we are in the sonic range of the flightpaths of a flock of birds returning to a roosting site, we become intimate with their together-ness. When people are awestruck by wonder, or tickled into laughter, or moved to tears, they momentarily transmit to each other before, between, and beyond language. Such transmissions need no translation to be contagious. They glow, lit from within. A patchwork of shared fabric and feeling offers the outline of customary forms of illumination but fleeting epiphanies and crowded memories extend this patchwork to a flow between celebration and mourning. Within this coloured glow it is possible to admit that tears are now also extra-human. This illuminated suspension equally shelters and shadows a dissenter’s disobedience, parsed by the sovereign through accusations and bail orders, producing a halfway-life in limbo between coercion, surrender, defiance, and heresy.


An owl and a donkey interpolate themselves, indicating the simultaneity of leaving and returning. Tyll of Braunschweig teaches us the trick of being on both sides of a mirror at once, reflected and reflecting, and Nasreddin of Aksehir shows us how to face the future riding backwards on a gentle, fearless donkey. Disappearing ephemera, history unmade or in the making, the scene that unfolds in the corner of the eye: all these matter. And notes taken of pictures that whisper and speak in tongues can move us to tears sometimes. Meanwhile, humor is yet another beast in a bestiary.

The only actually shared sensation is the present continuous tense. It reconstitutes, everyday, the coarse fabric of being human, rearranging the atoms of collective experience. Fleeting epiphanies crowd, asking – like auguries – to be read.

Unexpected arrivals (of a virus in one year) and departures (of a species in another) transform the colour of time. Each year gets a colour signature: a chromachron. And a room gets filled with the colors of the years through which its walls stand, waiting. It becomes a roomful of time, in neutral shades, or in camouflage. 

Iteration shown at: Bikaner House, New Delhi (2021)

A conversation in images, missives to selves and world, mood swings in lockdown and a share in the planet’s lucid dreams during a global pandemic. Gleaned from a month’s worth of the habit, within Raqs, of a regular chatter, the daily back and forth of things seen, heard, read and sensed between three people across decades. From the dawn of new feelings to the obstinate sediment of images that don’t let themselves be unseen. Disappearing ephemera, history in the making, the scene that unfolds in the corner of the eye – everything, and nothing. Real, imagined, and everywhere in between. Notes of pictures that whisper, speak in tongues, and sometimes leap, from hibernation to upheaval. 

Iterations shown at: ‘The Pandemic Circle’, Stamps Gallery, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, Expo Chicago – online (2020) | ‘CC: World’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt- online, Berlin (2020)

Ringing

Looped video

Reindeer

Looped video

A ringing interrupts everything. A reindeer looks for its herd. A herd looks for a path. A path looks for the world to come walking.

The Sovereign and its Company are multiple, and multiply formed. Anything can be deputized. The historical glory and moral authority of the sovereign and its company melts away, and then reconstitutes itself, constantly. Haunted by it’s own past, it splinters into shadowy incoherence, and then re-forms to greet the future. The question is, till when?

Tears are not only for weeping, they lubricate the possibility of vision. Sometimes we see things better when we cry, cry out aloud, or laugh, till the tears come unbidden.

Iteration shown at: Frith Street Gallery, London (2024)

As time refracts, its shatter illuminates differing strands. A comic’s contempt, her whisper of laughter, threatens the consensus. The sovereign clocks itself at every chuckle that diminishes its force field. Bail conditions set narrow perimeters, and life is forced into constraints. Laughter remains a dangerous terrain.

The ghost is here again to be neither witness, nor agent, not even provocateur, to be perhaps just a haunting laugh through time. To bundle sentience and turn on the electric wavelengths of interconnected metabolic surges coursing through the shared inhabitation of a wet planet wandering through a big, crowded sky: That is what the surge is.

Iteration shown at: ‘Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar’, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014)

The Blood of Stars invites us to think about the relation between the presence of iron, a fugitive from the stars, sleeping deep inside the earth and the veins of warm-blooded mammals. Meanwhile, it reads meteorites for clues about the stains at the edge of every sharp blade that cuts into flesh, and registers resonances that ricochet between mining, militarism and the mutations that mark a remote landscape.

Iteration shown at: ‘Extracts from a Future History’, Lulea  (2017)

Bestiary

Paper, digital drawings, photographic colour print, gold embossing
40 prints of 33 x 46 cm each

A New Jataka Tale:
A Sumatran Rhinoceros, a Splendid Poison Frog, a Golden Bamboo Lemur loudly argue on the way to extinction. “Which form of life will persist”, they ask, “outlasting all others?” “How many will persist as ghosts in the textbooks of zoology?” 
The Homo Sapiens, out-of-turn, says that only he can claim the future. At this, the splendid frog, with no poison to dispense, retreats into shadow. The golden lemur, barely clinging to existence, chooses silence. Only the formerly magnificent rhinoceros, legendary for her patience speaks up.
“Nothing persists, friends, if it is not remembered. Dear biped, we are still in your remembered bestiary, and in your library. So we live, after a fashion, in your memory. But once you are done with us, what will be left for you to live with, and live on? And once you depart, who will remember you? The cockroaches, they do not like archives!” 

She attained Buddha-hood.

Indian Porter Corps open theatre at Kut at the Imperial War Museum Archives depicts three dancing figures shrouded in white, dancing for a group of men seated around them in an open field. A Sergeant or officer stands with a cane, in the upper right hand corner of the frame. The performers, and the majority of the men, are porters – members of the Indian Labour Corps, who form an important part of the narrative. In Three Shadows (of care, rage, and indifference), these dancing figures in white have been isolated and animated to render them into ghostly spinning spectres.

This is in keeping with the fragments found in letters from the battlefields by Indian soldiers and non-combatants referring to spectres and a sound recording of an Indian prisoner of war in a camp in Germany speaking about ghosts emanating from the battlefields.

Iterations shown at: FirstSite, Colchester, United Kingdom (2018) | Frith Street Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2019)

In the sonic range of the flight-path of a gathering of birds, we momentarily transmit to each other. We surpass contours of containment, and need no translation to be contagious.

Every wilful misstep, every greedy grab, is an intimate intimidation to our own longer future. How do we stay together, in care of each other, when the fold of our collectivity is augured under the mark of contamination?

An owl and a donkey interpolate themselves, indicating the simultaneity of leaving and returning. Tyll of Braunschweig teaches us the trick of being on both sides of a mirror at once, and Nasreddin of Akşehir shows us how to face the future riding backwards on a gentle, fearless donkey. 

Time to pause. Time to ask, Do harmonious friends cause dissonance? There is perhaps a new Jataka tale here to be read into the future. Let us wait for it.